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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

AZIZAH AL-HIBRI

Azizah Al-Hibri[1] is a Lebanese-American who graduated
with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the American University of Beirut in
1966. She subsequently earned
a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a Ph.D. in
philosophy, also from UPenn. Today she is a practicing attorney specializing in
securities and corporate law, a professor of law at the University of Richmond,
and the founding
editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She is also
the founder and executive director of KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human
Rights. This organization is heavily funded
by the El-Hibri Charitable Foundation, which was established by Al-Hibri's
brother Ibrahim, who earned a fortune from his business transactions with Saudi
Arabia. Another
major donor
has been Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose $10-million-dollar check for
post-9/11 disaster relief was famously rejected
by then-New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani when the prince suggested that U.S.
policies in the Middle East had provoked the al Qaeda attacks.

Al-Hibri has written
and lectured extensively on Islam's compatibility with women's
rights, human rights, and democracy. Further, she contends that when
America's founding fathers (most notably Thomas Jefferson, who owned a copy of
the Qur'an, and James Madison) sought to establish freedom of religion, they
likely drew their inspiration from “the Islamic model of 1500 years
ago”—specifically, “a Qur'anic revelation which says there shall be no coercion
in religion.”

Al-Hibri served
on the advisory board of the American Muslim Council during the
1990s, a time when that organization was under the leadership of Abdurahman Alamoudi, who would
later be convicted and incarcerated on terror-related charges. In a 1995
congressional hearing, Al-Hibri testified
against the Comprehensive
Anti-Terrorism Act, complaining that the legislation “gives
the President the ability to designate, with no effective recourse, certain
groups as terrorist.”

In September 1998, when the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex
scandal was at its height, Al-Hibri wrote
an article
stating: “Had the President [when he perjured
himself] been testifying in an Islamic court, he would not have been placed in
this terrible predicament in the first instance.” Al-Hibri pointed out, further,
that the case against Clinton was weakened by the fact that four
witnesses—Sharia Law's standard for adultery convictions—were lacking. She noted
that under Sharia, Clinton's accusers, “who violated his privacy and broadcast
his behavior,” would themselves have been considered “guilty” and subject to
punishment. And she speculated that Clinton, “coming from a religious
background,” “may have understood the religious significance of [vaginal]
penetration and hence avoided it,” thus restricting his activities to oral
sex.

In early 2001,
Al-Hibri traveled
to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and condemned the Western press for
“sensationalizing” Taliban atrocities in order to “attack Islam.” A month after
9/11, she cautioned
the U.S. against striking militarily against al Qaeda and Taliban targets during
the holy month of Ramadan, lest America offend “the sensitivities of the Muslim
world” and thereby “give bin
Laden one more tool to argue to the Muslim world that the United States is
disrespectful of their religion.” That same year, Al-Hibri defended
Wahhabism, the extreme brand of fundamentalist Islam that is practiced in Saudi
Arabia, as part of the “religious diversity” in Islam's “marketplace of ideas.”
And in October 2001, she expressed
support for a fundamentalist approach to Islam.

In a 2002 interview with
Bill Moyers, Al-Hibri asserted
that "there [is] no reason at all to think that Qur'an [sic] gives women a
subordinate place in society.”

At a 2004 United Nations seminar on “Islamophobia,” Al-Hibri expressed
bewilderment as to why anyone should be critical of Islam, whose holy book gave
“dignity to the children of Adam,” and whose doctrines encouraged freedom of
religion, freedom of thought, and democratic, consultative government. Indeed,
she added, the very concept of the separation of church and state came from
Islam, whose early leaders were forbidden to adopt any one school of political
thought.

In a 2007 article
that appeared in the Arab News, a Saudi publication, Al-Hibri opined
that “Islamic fiqh [jurisprudence] is deeper and better than Western
codes of law.” In a similar vein, she contends
that Saudi Arabia’s criminal-justice system is superior to its “impersonal and
powerful” American counterpart. And she has praised
Islamic Law for ensuring that capital punishment “is not imposed unless due
process has been observed in a fair trial, and extenuating circumstances were
fully considered.” By contrast, Al-Hibri has called for a moratorium on capital
punishment in the United States, on grounds that its application is rife with
“inequities and biases” that “disproportionately” affect
“minorities.”

On
June 7, 2011, President Barack
Obamaappointed
Al-Hibri to a two-year term
on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan federal
panel tasked
with reviewing the circumstances surrounding violations of religious freedom
internationally, and making policy recommendations to the President, the
Secretary of State, and Congress. The Islamic Society of North America, at
whose events Al-Hibri has sometimes appeared, expressed
its strong approval for her appointment by Obama.